Sojin Park

#1.

It’s been almost a year and a half since I’ve been living apart from my family. Even though we’re only about 10-15 minutes away from Seoul, it’s not easy to see my family often. Opportunities to travel together will be even rarer.

With that in mind, I’ve been deliberately making an effort to seize opportunities to travel with my family. I thought it would be nice to travel domestically or abroad once or twice a year to spend time growing closer. In October, I went to Sokcho and got to look at the sea as much as I wanted.

Wanting to better remember the moments spent traveling with my family, I bought an Osmo Pocket 3 camera. It’s a camera that makes it easy to shoot vlogs, and its performance is quite impressive. The image quality is good, and it can fully capture the moments I see while walking without any shake. It can also stand alone with a tripod, which makes it convenient to film moments of eating together with family.

Editing the footage afterward with software like CapCut is also fun.

I hesitated a lot before buying it because it was a bit pricey, but I’m glad I did.

#2.

I care a lot about how clean the floor is. If there’s hair on the floor or I feel dust under my feet, it doesn’t feel great. I used to diligently clean and wipe the floor with a vacuum cleaner and a mop. But since I live alone and my work is busy, I didn’t have the time or energy to clean every day. So I just ended up living in a slightly messy state.

The 15 minutes it took to vacuum every day and the 10 minutes to mop the floor felt like such a waste, so I finally decided to buy a robot vacuum cleaner. I wondered why I’d need a robot vacuum in a 12-pyeong, 1.5-room apartment, but now that I’ve bought one, I wonder why I didn’t buy it sooner. The vacuum removes hair and wipes away dust every single day, and it makes such a huge difference in quality of life. Now I could just lie down on the floor and it’d be fine…

It might be a stretch to say the robot vacuum caused this change, but I’ve been living much more energetically than before. I think it’s because the energy I used to spend keeping the house clean has decreased, and I feel happier living in a cleaner state than I could manage on my own.

#3.

I have an aversion to spending money unconsciously. I dislike having a lot of stuff, and I don’t want to live extravagantly. However, I think it’s okay to spend more on things that offer new experiences, like a robot vacuum or a camera. It seems like that enriches life much more than saving money.

I recently read Paul Graham’s essay “How to Lose Time and Money,” and it makes a similar point. Rich people don’t become poor because they spent a lot of money, but because they invested their money poorly. Wasting time isn’t the result of playing around, but of spending time on the wrong things. I should invest some money so that I can spend my time on things I find meaningful.